You can’t yell you’re way out of this one, Bill..no, wait. Maybe you can.
And here’s another one. Questions are being raised about reporter Bill O’Reilly’s accounts of being “bombarded” during the LA riots.
This process resembles sexual harassment. One way you can tell the falsely accused from the genuine miscreants is that one accuser opens the floodgates when there is substance to the complaint. Very few sexual harassers aren’t serial by nature–think Bill Cosby. Heck, think Joe Biden. The O’Reilly debacle is following the script of the Brian Williams drama almost exactly, except that NBC finally acted responsibly, though not until it had tried the old “let’s see if this will just blow over” ploy.
So how many reports of O’Reilly hyping facts and enhancing his bravery and boldness will have to surface before Fox News stops covering for him and acts like a legitimate news organization? ( For those who have forgotten, such a news organization values trust and integrity, rather than emulates President Obama’s insistence that the I.R.S was as clean as the driven snow. ( It was and is not, and the news media’s partisan decision to bury the scandal rather than investigate it will haunt it for a long, long time.)
The network seems intent on destroying any credibility there was to the claim that it was dedicated to truth rather than bias, and qualified to expose the distortions of the liberal-biased mainstream media. Forced to deal with a parallel incident to NBC’s Williams crisis, Fox has chosen profit over professionalism (Bill’s ratings while playing victim have been boffo!) and is botching a brilliant opportunity to prove its critics wrong.
Instead, Fox is proving critics correct. Eventually, all but the shameless will begin to feel like they are getting the news from charlatans, and seek enlightenment elsewhere. NBC was late to choose integrity; Fox News may be too late.
Ethics Alarms 
Fox News is in danger of disappearing from my viewing schedule. Only Red Eye remains. And only on weekend rebroadcasts.
I can still stand Kelly and van Susteren. Red Eye brings some fun, sometimes – but it is very bad for my insomnia. Generally, Red Eye is on too late, and on weekends, I am too busy to stop to watch rebroadcasts. I wish Hannity would do more of those “studio audience” things – but it must be incredibly difficult to get all those hyper-talkers together all at once.
What I think I like least about this is the precedent. This is what MSNBC will point to when they bring Williams back. This is what CNN will point to when they have a legitimacy problem. “Well, Fox didn’t fire O’Reilly! Why should we lose OUR cash cow?!”
Shit. And here I was hopeful.
And maybe I shouldn’t have been. Maybe cynical as a default position is closer to reality than I thought. Because I knew that in order for real change to happen, Bill had to go, and I knew that FOX is arrogant, and not terribly self aware.
You are totally correct, however, the IRS scandal has disappeared from the wire, and I daresay if you brought it up again a lot of your friends, not all of them liberal, would just ask “are you still stuck on THAT?” Brian Williams ratings might have started to sag after it was revealed that he stole valor, and I think the real reason that NBC sacked him, sorry, suspended him, is that he was perceived as possibly hurting their bottom line. Bill has not hurt Fox’s bottom line at all… yet. Once he starts to be a liability, he will get the boot.